


Prayer

by Mossbeast



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen, Grimmjow uses his pretty head, I don't even remember when I wrote this but I like it, Other, as in we don't, introspective, no beta we die like Ichigo Kurosaki, so here have it, this is ancient, to deal with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28617135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mossbeast/pseuds/Mossbeast
Summary: Heavily inspired by Prayer of the Refugee.
Kudos: 5





	Prayer

**Author's Note:**

> At least judging by the lyrics.   
> Honestly I don't know. I'm sitting in a tiny room waiting for _The Day Of The COVID-Test_ and running through Phineas and Ferb. 
> 
> I dedicate this to all the lovelies in the GrimmIchi server <3

_We are the angry and the desperate, the hungry and the cold._

Hueco Mundo was glaringly empty. Dead. Neverchanging. Sometimes a Hollow would scream out its hunger and desperation, but the silence was so loud, so oppressive, few others would ever hear. It rang in Grimmjow's ears as he dug his battered, bruised body out of the bonewhite sand, clawing through the unimaginable mass of trickling sand. Funny how something so small could band together to become so stifling, caging. The ultimate, impenetrable fortress. The one thing no shinigami could ever understand, it wasn't the claws, fangs or poison of the Hollows that protected Hueco Mundo, she took care of herself. She was everywhere and nowhere at once, everything and nothing.  
A single grain of sand couldn't do much, but all of it? She'd be an unstoppable force if she ever decided to interfere. She inhabited the crevices of his mask, lingered in his hair regardless of how often he tried to shake her, clung to the folds of his clothes. 

_A life no one could touch._

Pantera was not with him.

Right. They had been fighting, the upstart shinigami with hair so bright it hurt his eyes had pulled a mask over his face. His reiatsu had tasted like pain, like madness. Bitter, tangy, coating the roof of Grimmjow's mouth and choking him from inside. The way prey tasted. He took a deep breath of the thick air to cleanse his senses. He couldn't smell anyone close by. His fraccion were dead, gone, sacrificed because he'd decided they needed to prove themselves. The other Espada had mostly vanished as well, there was Hallibel and her fraccion, Oderschvank and two others Grimmjow couldn't place. No Arrancar, no Vasto Lorde. Adjuchas, a few, spread out far and wide, untouchable from where he stood, in the middle of the emptiness.  
Something sang to him from far away, familiar and comforting. Soothing an ache he hadn't even registered as wrong. But he always ached, the heart he lacked had torn a huge, gaping hole into his being, kept eating at him like acid. Every Hollow he consumed only added to the craving, added to the pain reverberating through him. He dropped his head back, to stare at the pale moon, and howled at her like a beast, casting his own reiatsu out like a flare.  
He was nothing but a beast, a perfect hunter. He relished killing, blood spattering everywhere, drenching him and painting the message he desperately wanted the worlds to see: I am king. _I am not prey._

Something moved towards him, fast, something strong but not unbeatable. He bared his teeth and readied himself, expecting, no, hoping, for a fight. He'd been lost in the sand, for how long he couldn't tell, but he was Grimmjow. Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez. He would rise again, devour the weak and once more be undisputed king. He would protect this land that was his. No more shinigami, no more humans. Just Hollows, eat or be eaten. Fuck Pantera. Aizen's wish to make them like him, splitting off part of their soul to become a likeness of the shinigami, of worthless, cowardly hunters.  
No, Grimmjow would be that no more. He ached for the part of his soul that had, to some extent, always made sense to him. The blade, as part and extension of his soul, had molded itself to him, had complimented him unlike anything he'd ever experienced. It wasn't too surprising, given that she was him, and he was her, but he didn't need her anymore. He could fight with the rest of his body, because unlike the other Arrancar, all of his being was will to rule supreme and fight. He was instinct to hunt and destroy. Aizen had merely picked a single grain from the vast desert and reshaped it. But what is a desert missing a grain? Still a desert. It is still vast, still neverchanging. Lots of small pieces formed a whole, but one of them missing didn't change anything about the nature of an ocean. He was still as Hollow as he had been before, no more, no less. The loneliness tore at him but it didn't change who he was. Hollow. King.  
What is a little more pain to a being that only consists of regret and hunger for things it, by value of its nature, can never have?

The figure roamed closer, Grimmjow could now sense that it was shinigami. It didn't wear the black uniform, wasn't the inverse image of himself. This one was different. Still no more than a meaningless grain of sand in the workings of Soul Society, but perhaps one that could hurt a running machine, could over time rub and sand at the cogs firmly turning in their places until their teeth were worn so thin that they broke off and let the machine stutter.   
Perhaps, this once, he would listen before he struck.

The figure looked oddly familiar, Grimmjow had seen him around in the town where Kurosaki lived. An exiled shinigami? He flexed his fingers, missing the motion of claws sliding out, glinting in the pale moonlight over Hueco Mundo. He was evolved now, better, for all intents and purposes, but he'd roamed the desert as an adjuchas for a long time. Four strong legs carrying him across the dunes, acute senses telling him where he needed to go. This body, with all the advantages of opposable thumbs, didn't and wouldn't ever live up to it. The panther was a weapon, a predator. The human, however, was adaptable. Capable of peaceful life, of coexistence. Truly laughable that Aizen had chosen him for his army of Arrancar. Grimmjow would never have torn off his mask, why should he? He'd been indestructable, untouchable. Not Vasto Lorde, but he didn't need that. He could hunt perfectly fine the way he was, even prey that claimed to be stronger. Another had thought they needed to change the desert and gotten lost in their sandcastle.  
He bristled at the memory of Aizen's hogyoku digging around in his soul, breaking off part of it and twisting it into something that Grimmjow would be dependent on. He'd been crippled by the will to do good, and the crutch he'd been given was lacking. He could go without it.

Green and white striped bucket hat, green coat, wooden sandals, walking stick. Pale blonde hair that seemed almost white in the cold light of the crescent in the sky. Unassuming, but a lot of predators were. They had to be, in order to fly under the radar of the king.   
Urahara Kisuke claimed to be friend to shinigami and Hollows, protector of the world of the living, only interested in balancing the three driving forces of the universe. Balance was favorable. An ecosystem couldn't sustain itself if a part of it was picked off the map. They stood in front of each other, staring and trying to read one another, only that neither was willing to give even a single inch. Silence rang loud in their ears and for once Grimmjow wished Hueco Mundo wasn't frozen. 

The shinigami spoke of a new threat, asked for assistance. Only as far as Grimmjow was willing to go, of course.  
He wanted to ask, wanted to know if Soul Society's golden boy couldn't help. But he didn't. He knew Kurosaki had been merely a boy, thrust into a cruel, unforgiving, everlasting war. No one sends the litter to fix their problems. The cubs are to be taught, always with a watching eye at threats to their back. But Soul Society didn't care for the laws of nature. That much had been evident when Aizen had taken it upon himself to reshape the Hollows he deemed worthy. He hadn't understood that they were all, in their own regard, worthy. They'd survived, hunger and hungrier hunters, cold and despair alike. The weak went to find shinigami and be cleansed. The powerful, the worthy?   
The hunters and killers and threats to his regency? They fought, tooth and nail and claw and poison, digging their way through the forest of menos back up to the moonlit surface of the desert, where the reiatsu hung like a hazy bell over the bonewhite sand.

In the end, he agreed to the foolish plans of the shinigami. He agreed to help those who had disturbed the ecosystem in the first place, let himself be placed like a pawn on a chessboard that was no desert. He sensed that there were other grains, of different deserts, different stones ground down to dust. Perhaps they could be a new force of small, insignificant indiviuals that rose to power as a union.  
He would still be king, Urahara promised. As a sign of good will, the shinigami produced something long clad in white linen. It sung to him a song of blood, of displaced entrails and shattering bones. A song of violence and a promise of power. 

Reverently he unwrapped Pantera, feeling the gap close, the hollowness abate. His fingers wrapped around the hilt, found the miniscule grooves he'd pressed into the wrapping. He felt balanced, and at the same time stifled. This was the mold he was supposed to fit, the perfect warrior of an insane man aspiring to godhood. When he lifted his gaze, every trace of the shinigami had disappeared. Suited him. He took another good look at the part of his sould that had been torn from him.  
Someone had spent a lot of time and attention on it, it was clean, well-oiled and sharp like the first time he'd picked her up. Her rumbling purr reverberated through him, this was the part Aizen hadn't liked. The animal.   
She did not tell him who had cared for her, even if it tore at him to know that someone had touched his soul so intimately. He didn't need caring. 

Urahara felt different, dusty somehow, he tasted like the scrolls had flavored Aizen's library in Las Noches. The people who shared his living space were mere whispers on folded steel, he doubted they'd ever known she was there. No, there was someone else. Someone with very little power, barely enough to grasp the soul piece. A whisper of a memory tickled at his senses, but what little traces stubbornly clung to the folded steel breathed of stubborn brown eyes turning golden and shining determined in the face of a battle they couldn't win. Never once had Kurosaki given in to despair, or given up. He'd clawed at Grimmjow's throne with a vehemence of a cub that didnt understand nor care for its place. Desperate to grow up in a desert where every mistake led to certain death.

He ran his fingers over the blade, uncaring that she sliced into him like a claw. They would become reacquainted. But no longer dependent. 

One day he would slice Kurosaki up and drink every dying moan and every last drop of blood, until he could devour all the reiatsu and establish himself as the hunter king again. 

_Don't hold me up now, I can stand my own ground. You won't let me down._

**Author's Note:**

> _Is this a drabble??_
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


End file.
